I grew up in a home filled with love. My parent were loving people who always did their best to provide for my siblings and I. I know this probably seems like I’m boasting about the perfect life I had growing up, but this is just to show how ignorant I was about the children that lived a life that was completely different from mine.
The day my eyes open to this alternate reality, I felt like a bucket of cold water had been poured over my head. I didn’t know his name at first, I just called him “baby boy” like other people in the area. I always thought the name was odd. We met when I was doing my National Youth Service Program, a few of us were chosen to go to a rural area for sensitization on various issues plaguing the society and this lasted for about two months. We focused mainly on the adults but ‘baby boy’ showed more interest in what we had to say than most of the adults.
But I wasn’t drawn to him because he was an inquisitive child, I noticed something strange about him that made me want to find out about what was going on in his life. There were times when our sensitization took hours because we had to really break it down for the people to understand, we could be there till 7pm. On those days, ‘baby boy’ would look really restless as he watched the sun go down and after a few minutes, he would just disappear. Whenever I asked if anyone had seen him, they would pretend like they couldn’t understand my question.
My curiosity got the best of me during one of our programs. I noticed when he slipped out and I snuck out to follow him, he walked for a while going through alleys until he finally stopped in front of a house that was notably bigger than the other houses in the area. I watched from afar as he leaned against the wall as if preparing for what was behind the gates, he didn’t notice me at first but as I hid, a cat passed by my legs making me squeal in fear. He looked in my direction and at that moment the gates were pushed open and fat and hairy woman came out.
She looked at him, looked in my direction, said nothing and just walked back in followed closely by ‘baby boy’ I didn’t see him at our programs for a while.
He finally came on the last day but he looked different, there were no questions and he sat really close to the exit. I went to talk to him but he shook his head telling me not to come near him.
I didn’t really understand why and I didn’t have the luxury of time because the sensitization had come to an end but I was too invested to ignore him so I wrote the address of a restaurant that was a bit far from the area on a small piece of paper and slipped it into his hands as I left that day.
He was limping as he came in and had some injuries on his hands, I didn’t notice that earlier. It took some reassuring and a plate of jollof rice for him to finally open up. He told me his real name was Joshua, raised by an alcoholic father because his mother died from childbirth. He had to struggle to survive on the street because his father only cared about his next bottle, he also used to sneak into the school in the area so he could learn a bit of school work.
When he turned 10, his father sold him to ‘Madam Big’ and his life only got worse from there.
He was prostituted to both men and women. That made me feel really sick not just because it was obviously a very inhumane thing to do but also because he was a child. He got the name ‘baby boy’ from the customers that frequented the prostitution house and eventually everyone else started using it. I told him I wanted to help but he just smiled, it didn’t last because he said he had to leave, it looked like he was worried that someone had seen him.
He left without saying goodbye.
I immediately got in contact with my office to see how we could help but I was told to wait till Monday for a proper complain to be made to the authorities and for the police to be involved. I wanted to do something but I couldn’t do it by myself so I waited.
Monday finally came and the necessary processes were followed, that evening we got the police to give us backup and we went to save Joshua.
We were too late.
He was beaten up for snitching and finally passed away from his injuries and other complication just a day before, we also found that he had AIDS, a child getting infected with such a disease. It wasn’t fair. We were able to save about 12 other children, both boys and girls but Madam Big escaped.
I swore on that day that I would make sure people were educated on the dangers of child prostitution and how rampant it is among street children
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